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Posted on 01/04/26 3:26:04 PM

DavidMac
Director of Photoshop
Posts: 6083

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MOVING FROM CYNIC TOWARDS WOW! Putting the rotate tool really through it's paces!

I have been really putting the new Rotate Object tool through its paces. Some serious and not so serious tests!

This is going to be the longest post I have ever done (maybe that anybody has ever done) but I genuinely hope you will find it informative ……. and, as compensation, it’s full of pictures of Steve!

Despite my antipathy to AI creations I have always been happy to let it do the grunt work and heavy lifting. Cut outs and selection for example. I use many of the new tools constantly and unhesitatingly. My difficulty has always been when it takes over and creates for me. ……. when I have to cross the line between accepting help and handing over responsibility.

I had difficulty accepting the new rotate object tool because it’s definitely ‘inventing’ stuff for me. But others have pointed out that it’s really useful and it does something I couldn’t do any other way. That’s undeniably true.

There’s a lot of AI in Photoshop that I haven’t tested because my Photographer’s Plan doesn’t cover premium features and every time I try I bang up against a pay wall. So I finally bit the bullet and took out an additional Firefly subscription. I now have access to all the premium features and partner features like Topaz and am starting to discover them in more depth.

Since this was all provoked by Steve's WOW! post on the Rotate Object Tool I decided to start by investigating it first and to try and find out just how good it really is. I have done some quite extensive testing that I want to share here.

This a tool which can be mind bogglingly amazing and, depending on your expectations and needs, can be quite disappointing and lacking too. I have tried to put it through a few simple tests here - some completely fair and reasonable and some completely unfair and unreasonable to the point of stupidity. I leave you to draw your own conclusions. I will not be concerning myself with the subsidiary technicalities, like fringing on the rotated results as these can easily be corrected and removed. My big concern here is just quite simply how well and how faithfully does it rotate things - especially people.

So I’m going to use a nice familiar object, even for those who may not have had the pleasure of meeting him first hand.

Here he is ……………….. two of him.

Now in every image to follow the left hand Steve will remain unaltered. He is our reference Steve against which we will judge results.

Now these tests do rather suppose that you tried this tool for yourself and are familiar with it. For those who are not here’s an attempted explanation from a position of considerable ignorance and conjecture. Rotate Object appears to work by creating a 3D object by interpolation (and sometimes seemingly pure guesswork) from the 2D image you want to rotate. Its first step is to create the 3D object. Once this done it appears, in very low res, on it’s own layer above the original and can be rotated and put through perspective modifications using your mouse or pen in exactly the same way you rotate 3D objects in a 3D app. Once you think you have arrived at the rotation (and/or perspective) that you want you click a Done button to accept it and Photoshop renders it to a full res layer. This is a special layer and rotations can be endlessly changed and re-edited without quality loss because it always re-edits from the original 3D object it created at the outset - almost exactly like a Smart Object.

What happens if we try to rotate Steve? The first step is to select him and go Edit > Rotate object. Photoshop will then extract him from the background and produce a low res version on a new layer in rotatable 3D.

Here it is ………….. If you look closely you can see the rotation ‘handles’ with little curved arrows on them.

The first obvious question is how accurate an interpolation of the 2D is this? Well one way to check is not to perform any kind of rotation but simply to click the Done button and have photoshop render the untouched 3D object back into a full res 2D layer without it having been touched in any way. If Photoshop is doing its job properly it should be indistinguishable from our original layer on the left.

Here it is below and ….. “Oh Dear”

… it’s not quite what we started with! He’s been scaled down but, more importantly somewhere, in the process he’s lost weight! You don’t need a grid to see quite clearly that he’s been laterally ‘squidged’ (or compressed if you wish to be technical). To be sure this wasn’t a momentary glitch I tried it multiple times and it happens every time!

Since this is the base upon which Photoshop will produce its rotations, every modification we do from now on will be based on slimline Steve! Forgive me If I suggest this is a less than ideal start.

But let’s get down to business and start rotating. To keep comparisons simple and easy to compare I am only going to do lateral rotation. I’ll not be touching vertical rotations or perspective change.

Here’s Steve rotated 45°.

Technically it’s bloody amazing! Since most of him has been interpolated from parts of Steve that were clearly visible Photoshop hasn’t had to ‘invent’ much that it couldn’t see and the result is very impressive! (Even if a bit too skinny …… and I don’t want his poncy new hairdresser!). But this is a serious test and I need to ask the serious and difficult question. Is this still Steve or is this a remarkable doppelgänger very subtly lacking in essential ‘Steveness’? It’s hard to say. If I showed you the image out of context you would undoubtedly say “That looks like Steve”’ but would you unhesitatingly say “That’s Steve.”. You must decide for yourselves. For me it’s marginal.

So now let’s be more ambitious and rotate him 90°.

Now Photoshop is having to ‘invent’ more unseen Steve and it shows! Once again the result is mind bogglingly impressive technically. But however amazing it may be (which it is) it’s definitely not Steve. The things that make a person recognisable are so subtle and indefinable that it would be a miracle if it was! (And I definitely don’t want this hairdresser.) I admit I’m being very harsh. With other kinds of objects this could still be close to perfect but, if this tool is to be used with people, it must preserve enough of them for them still to be the same person.

We are starting to hit a real limitation here. We can probably play wild games with physical objects but we are going to need to be very conservative and careful where people are concerned unless they are imaginary characters where recognition is not necessarily an issue. But tread carefully and it’s a totally viable and remarkable tool.

Now some bigger rotations.

From here on, it’s still technically amazing, in many ways even more amazing! But in terms of being Steve it goes rapidly further and further downhill (and he seems to get skinnier and skinnier).

My last image in this series is a full 360° rotation.

I wanted to see if it would really return to the original and it does! Although it’s still skinny Steve. It’s not a precise 360 as I have found no way of inputting precise rotations numerically. It seems to be only possible to rotate by eye. I think that’s a teeny bit of a shame but maybe it will come in future updates.

Now to another test. I thought it would interesting to see what Rotate Object would make of anthropomorphic foxes using the challenge image I made based on the “Fantastic Mr Fox”.

I started with Mrs Fox. You see here the original and below it the unrotated render from the rotatable object. Rescaling is much less evident here but her head has been tilted up a bit. Somehow, to my eye, something subtle in her character has changed too. A teeny bit disappointing for something which, in theory, should perfectly match the originaL

But, perhaps because we are less attuned to canidae recognition (look it up), the rotated result is, at first sight not bad. But a moment's reflection will show that her dress is growing up the back of her neck, her head seems to have shrunk and what was before a soft and feminine face has become quite hard and masculine. Now I appreciate that attributing feminine and masculine attributes to a fox (let alone expecting photoshop to respect them) is completely subjective and unfair. But this is an anthropomorphic fox so it matters!

Next I tried a cub. The middle cub in the front row. The rescaling before rotation has produced a disastrous mismatch before we even get started!

And the rotation has produced a result completely unrecognisable as having any connection to the original.

Now it’s an unfair test because I am forcing Photoshop to create a new fox from very little useful information ………… but even so! This bad? Surely it can do better than that …….. and to top it all the totally synthetic result just screams AI!

So that is the end of the serious tests and the results to my mind are just astonishing but with some very severe disciplines and limits needed where people (and foxes) are concerned.

I said in the last paragraph the end of the serious tests. Now we come to a new set of tests that are most certainly not serious.

When I was lot younger and machine translation was in its infancy and often very unpredictable and inaccurate we used to have fun giving a translator a text to translate into another language and then giving it the translation and asking it to translate it back into English. The phrase ‘lost in translation’ sometimes took on a whole new dimension and results were sometimes very entertaining!

To make this work and deprive the translator of ‘prior knowledge’ the original translation would be exported to a text file, the translator would be restarted and then given the text file to translate back from scratch.

It occurred to my rather devious mind that the same principle could be applied to Rotate Object!

What would happen if I rasterised the rotated Steves and asked Photoshop to rotate them back to the original position? Photoshop will have lost its rotatable model because I have rasterised it. In each case it will have to create a completely new rotatable Steve from the ersatz rotated pseudo Steve. This is both monstrously silly and frankly rather evil, but I thought it would be fun to try!

To my amazement the results were not as risible as I had expected. They were off target as far as being Steve was concerned (under the circumstances they couldn’t fail to be) but far closer than I would ever have imagined possible! The last one, which is produced from truly minimal information, is a real surprise!

So how WOW! is it?

From being a total cynic I have come round to accepting that this is an amazing tool that at times almost defies belief!

But, looking beyond the bells and whistles, there are some inherent limitations that must be taken into account to get the best out of it.

Used discreetly it’s a remarkable and useful tool. There will also be times where used extravagantly it will work magic unthinkable any other way aside from porting to external 3D.

If after such a long and indigestible post you are inclined to let out a loud belch, you are forgiven ………………

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The subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is invariably inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it .......

Posted on 02/04/26 10:15:39 AM

DavidMac
Director of Photoshop
Posts: 6083

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